The National Food Security Bill, 2011, designed to make Access to food a legal right, is the last chance to convert Gandhiji's vision of a hunger-free India into reality. What Mahatma Gandhi said of the role of food in a human being's life in a 1946 speech at Noakhali, now in Bangladesh, remains the most powerful expression of the importance of making Access to food a basic human right. Gandhiji also...

The Planning Commission's laughable estimates of the ‘poverty line' follow from a mistake in method that it made 30 years ago and has clung to ever since. The affidavit that the Planning Commission recently submitted before the Supreme Court stating that a person is to be considered ‘poor' only if his or her monthly spending is below Rs.781 (Rs.26 a day) in the rural areas and Rs.965 (Rs.32 a day) in...

Are millions of Indians being forced to leave their villages for cities and towns because there aren't enough jobs at home and farm incomes are drying up? Is this "distress migration" unprecedented in India's history? Award-winning journalist P Sainath thinks so. Examining the latest census data, he finds that India's urban population has risen more (91 million more than in the 2001 census) than the rural population (90.6 million more than...

Of late, there has been a debate on whether public programmes such as school education, scholarships, health-care delivery and Access to microcredit can be targeted at beneficiaries based on religion; some consider this ‘unconstitutional' and argue that it amounts to discrimination. I highlight the constitutional provisions and argue that there is nothing in the Constitution which bars identification of beneficiaries based on religion. Religious identity is listed on a par...

-IBN   Fresh controversy is set to erupt over Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai's loss estimates on the 2G spectrum sale. CAG documents Accessed through Right to Information Act (RTI) by accused show that CAG overruled its own auditor on 2G loss calculation. According to Director General Audit (Post & Telecommunications) RP Singh the issue of Unified Access Service (UAS) licences and allotment of 2G spectrum caused a loss of Rs...